Red Bull’s Hilarious Flugtag DIY Flying Machine Competition

Remember that “egg drop” ID school project? For the uninitiated, the students design a vessel to hold a single egg. The vessel is then dropped off the roof of a building, and the egg is meant to survive the fall.Red Bull’s Flugtag (German for “flight day”) event is a much more exciting version of the egg drop. In this international competition, teams design and build an engine-free flying craft. Each team has four crew members and one pilot. The crew members push the craft down a short runway platform built above a body of water, and then design + gravity decide how far the pilot will make it. The results range from impressive to hilarious. There are no engineering requirements to enter, which occasionally results in highly ambitious designs executed by folks with a poor grasp of flight mechanics. Additionally, entrants are judged on creativity and showmanship, not just flight distance, encouraging strange and unusual concepts.Here’s a compilation of the most, and least, impressive creations. The teams in this vid hailed from Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States.